Happy Mothers Day!

My mother had a silk screen of the Brooklyn Bridge done by Wayne Thiebaud, very different from the work for which he later became famous. It was given to her in 1960 by coworkers at the Chico State library when we moved to Fresno. It hung over the sofa in the living room for forty five years.

She took it down to hang this, one of my first quilts. I liked the scrapiness of it and knew she would appreciate its earthtones. But it is an amateur’s work. Not all the points are sharp. Nor do they all meet. The quilting is mere wavy lines stitched across the front of the quilt. In fact, it embarrassed me a bit. She had friends who quilted, who would know this was the work of a beginner, and a beginner without much artistic talent. I urged her to put Thiebaud back up.

“I like it. I was tired of Thiebaud.”

She said she remembered the quilting frame set up once or twice a month in the parlor of her grandmother Ornbaum’s house and the ladies gathered to quilt. She showed me an old quilt her grandmother Ornbaum had made. It is beyond repair. I remember other quilts. We used them as moving blankets, wrapped them around the furniture. I remember a hand stitched multicolored wedding ring quilt frayed and tattered, perhaps one of those stitched in the Ornbaum parlor.

When my mother moved to a senior apartment, she sold or gave away the art work she had collected over her lifetime and took with her only pieces done by her daughters. I told her she should keep the quilt where she could wrap herself in it on the couch when she read, but she hung it on the wall.

“It’s not art, Momma,” I told her.

“I like it. It is too art.”

The quilt is in my house now. The golds have faded. Some of the red has washed into the browns. I didn’t hang it. I wrap myself in it when I sit on the couch.

Happy Mothers Day!